Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes

Abstract

To enhance their reputations, adults and even 5-year-old children behave more prosocially when being observed by others. However, it remains unknown whether children younger than five also manage their reputations. One established paradigm for assessing reputation management is the ‘watching eyes paradigm,’ in which adults have been found to be more prosocial in the presence of eyes versus control images. However, the robustness of this effect in adults has recently been called into question, and it has never been demonstrated in children. In Study 1, we used a method similar to that used in prior work: 3- and 5-year-old children took part in a prosocial task while in the presence of an image of eyes or flowers but without explicit mention or reference to the image. With this method, children did not show the watching eyes effect. In Study 2, 3-year-old children were tested with a modified watching eyes paradigm, wherein they first explicitly interacted either with images of eyes or with cloth flowers, and they then engaged in a prosocial task. With this modified watching eyes paradigm, 3-year-olds showed the predicted effect: They were more prosocial following exposure to eyes than flowers. These results offer potential insight into the mixed findings across the adult literature, such that the manner of exposure, and specifically how explicit the exposure is, may influence the watching eyes effect. Finally, no study to date has examined whether cues of human presence other than the eyes also influence prosociality. We found that children in the Mouth condition were prosocial at an intermediate level between the Eyes and Flowers conditions. Overall, the findings point to the remarkably early emergence of reputation management in human ontogeny.

Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others

“…Alongside these issues, our findings raise important theoretical questions related to why pre-schoolers resource allocation rates differed with high-and low-merit co-workers. Before considering the richer merit-based account, it is important to note here that our data could also be interpreted as providing support for either a lean associationist or a reputational management account [40,41,42]. Regarding the former, it may be argued that pre-schoolers within this study simply formed a more positive association with the puppet that was linked to the conferring of the stickers.…”

“…Due to the co-worker puppet remaining present during the sharing task, it could also be argued that any tendency to share more with a high merit puppet may to some degree also be due to pre-schoolers desire to manage their reputation [42]. Such reasoning (e.g., thinking about what the puppet would think about them) involves more advanced forms of social understanding (e.g., second order false belief), and is considered to be beyond the capabilities of pre-schoolers [47].…”

Watching eyes do not stop dogs stealing food: evidence against a general risk-aversion hypothesis for the watching-eye effect

“…Two studies have found no evidence for the watching-eye effect in children 90,91 . However, a third study, which used real photos of eyes rather than stylized images and primed children with the test stimuli prior to the experiment, did find evidence of the watching-eye effect in pre-schoolers 92 . The authors posited that without the priming, the infants did not attend to the eyes during the experiment.…”

The Development of Prosocial Emotions

“…Additionally, children become increasingly aware between these ages that they are being seen and evaluated by others and that their behaviors convey important social information to others (Engelmann & Rapp, 2018; Vaish & Tomasello, 2014). For instance, 3-year-olds engage in some self-presentation behaviors such as lying after cheating (Evans & Lee, 2013) and increasing their prosocial behavior under cues of being observed (Kelsey, Grossmann, & Vaish, 2018), perhaps to present themselves in a positive light. Children of this age may thus begin to recognize the importance of showing one’s commitment to others, such as by repairing harm that one caused or reciprocating help one received.…”